It's not
needlessly complex. The workflow it was created to support is inordinately complex, and the target market for that is highly technical, so its complexity was not the issue. Kernel developers needed to communicate to other kernel developers in a decentralized manner, and needed to work on top of each other. How do you work on a project where there are 15,000 people writing code? Git was created for this purpose.
It's as complex as it needs to be to support the workflows it was designed to be. A dumber tool would be easy to create, but then it would not be able to support more complex workflows like linux kernel development. So it's not needlessly complex, though it is more complex than it needs to be for simple use cases.
For those needing a less complicated frontend, there's a large number of them to make it easier to interact with git. For people that aren't full-time software developers, I don't recommend using git directly. However for those that are, it's worth taking the time to understand the underlying concepts so git becomes something you understand because once you do, it's quite elegant for what it does. I'm not going to gatekeep being a software developer on whether or not you know git, but if figuring out for yourself how such a fundamental system works doesn't give you a release of dopamine, this might not be your kind of thing. Which is totally fine. There are tons of things that are and aren't my thing.
I recommend https://learngitbranching.js.org for learning how to navigate around git.
but of course, https://xkcd.com/1597/ applies as well.
It's as complex as it needs to be to support the workflows it was designed to be. A dumber tool would be easy to create, but then it would not be able to support more complex workflows like linux kernel development. So it's not needlessly complex, though it is more complex than it needs to be for simple use cases.
For those needing a less complicated frontend, there's a large number of them to make it easier to interact with git. For people that aren't full-time software developers, I don't recommend using git directly. However for those that are, it's worth taking the time to understand the underlying concepts so git becomes something you understand because once you do, it's quite elegant for what it does. I'm not going to gatekeep being a software developer on whether or not you know git, but if figuring out for yourself how such a fundamental system works doesn't give you a release of dopamine, this might not be your kind of thing. Which is totally fine. There are tons of things that are and aren't my thing.
I recommend https://learngitbranching.js.org for learning how to navigate around git.
but of course, https://xkcd.com/1597/ applies as well.